“In these memories and landscapes, in these notes toward the history of his sensibility, there is great objectivity: the poet doesn’t set out to fantasize, or to lie to himself or anyone else. He attempts only to illuminate, with an almost impersonal light, something very personal: a few moments in his life. (But is it truly ours, this life we live?)” —Octavio Paz

“Cernuda’s brief meditations on love, war and exile collected for the first time in one volume show the poet stretching his language and imaginative skills to capture abstracted emotions—an idle afternoon, or the deep longing of a man cut off not only from his homeland but also from a world seemingly determined to keep itself at war….In Stephen Kessler’s idiomatic translation, the impressionistic snapshots are compulsively readable.” —St. Petersburg Times

“There is absolutely no artifice in his warm and candid writings, but they are, as it were, constantly aware of their artifice. Finding words for the mute torments of his sensibility, he considers himself to be ‘a sleepless voice calling who knows what or to whom in night’s nameless immensity.’ A permanent tension consequently underlies the calm, if syntactically intricate, surface of his prose (which has been sensitively rendered by Stephen Kessler, who also provides an insightful preface).” —Chelsea

“Stephen Kessler’s brilliant translation...has to be one of the best books of Spanish poetry to appear in English this year....Kessler needs to be acknowledged as one of our best translators today, and this book brings to life a key Spanish poet.” —Ray Gonzalez, The Bloomsbury Review